I believe this would be a huge mistake. I can't even begin to express how utterly retarded it would be on all of our parts to let our government control the internet. Why would the president need to turn off the internet? What purpose would it serve? To stop information? Why? What information are we afraid thats not already in circulation? But the fact that we are debating this issue concerns me more. Because that means people see the sense...not that that matters because if the powers that be want to do it, they will.But I have yet to hear a reason that makes sense.If you make decisions out of fear you always create what you fear.

Yeah, it's totally absurd. We have to think about this seriously? Putting anyone in charge of "killing the internet" is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard. They've been trying to push this one over for a long time now. It doesn't make any sense, never has, and makes it seem like something else is going on here.

The problem for the government is the internet is a new breed of technology that they can't ever control. It seems they want to have control of the internet...but they can't have it. There's too much at stake. No one entity can ever have control of the internet, unless you're China? Maybe the US is trying to follow China's lead, but eventually take it even further. Who knows? It's just stupid. You might as well put internet kill switches in random cages at the zoo and see which animal turns it off first. It makes almost the same amount of sense. Actually, the animals would probably sense danger before humans... but what danger and whose facing the danger exactly?

The day someone or something gets that much control over the internet is the day we are doomed. Can you imagine one day the internet is "disconnected" and we can't have access to it. I wouldn't want to be anywhere when that happens. There would probably be a massive panic that would make all other panics look like an afternoon strolling down on the beach.

It reminds me of the scene in the Star Wars Prequels when Chancilor Palpatine used an emergincy to get their government to grant him even more power. Didn't Rahm Emanuel once say something about how You never want to let a crisis go to waste?

The US created the web? Hmmm, I don't think you really should be saying that because it is an incredibly large generalization and not based on facts. Who is the US anyway? There's no real answer for that either.

There are multiple things that make up the internet and each thing was created at a different time by different individuals. It was pieced together over a long period of time. Just the internet, www, and email alone were created separately at different times by different people. The creation of the internet and the www is way too complex to say the US created it. Even the "creators" were always relying on other people that we don't know of and not everyone was from the US. It's a twisted up history that would be impossible to know. It's true that a lot of the individuals responsible may have been from the US but there are other very important people from other countries who've had a hand in the process, and the process is still developing today. It's a mutable force that will never stop changing. The "internet" today would be totally unrecognizable to someone from 1990.

The "US" has no right at this point to claim ownership or tell anyone what to do with it, especially when all the fools in the government probably have no idea where it all came from or how it was all put together. I'm just guessing but I don't think this kind of technology is something politicians understand on a high level, or even on a low level.

Within this current reality there's no answer to who created the internet.

The question isn't "should the government censor the internet" but "should the president have the ability to turn it on and off."

Whenever this question has been asked before it has been focused on the the concept of cyber-terrorism. Could a foriegn attack be cut off with a kill switch. As a theory it sounds like a good idea but the logistics of doing it are near impossible because the internet is running through so many pipelines through the ground and through the air. The bigger question shouldn't be "can the government shut it down" but rather "what can the government do to prevent the hypothetical attack."

I think the basic answer is that the system is too large for the government to handle securitization and individual companies should be responsible for their own security. Unfortunately most of them are not prepared. Areas that are considered vulnerable include the banking system, power companies, creditors, and so on.

Other ideas you might want to ponder...

Why do people reaveal so much information to private corporations on the internet that they would never want the government to have?

Why do kids today feel fine posting their lives for everyone to see?

Is it OK for companies like Google to share private information with government agencies in criminal cases involving pornography, identity theft and so on?

The point is that we all fear the government and what they know about us. Yet, very often we are willing to give that up to private entities who may potentially sell our info to 3rd parties or use it in ways that may impede on our privacy. the question of whether or not there should be a kill switch on the internet is intriguing yet it overshadows much larger questions about what is really going on.

So this move is a preemptive strike for some hypothetical scenario??? Sounds a lot like the last dictatorship, I mean President that was running our country. Sounds like the same agendas by the same people. Its like saying, should the president have the power to turn off all the phones? Or should the president have the power to make sure we don't talk to each other at all? What if the president said, ok, everyone stop talking to each other, anyone caught talking to each other will be arrested, this is national security..??? Are we all so afraid of the unknown that we let go of common sense and our freedoms? We're talking people. THe US or any other country is just people...this bill is about one man having power over everyone. Thats not the concept of a President. DOesn't he work for us? So far all terrorists acts have been by people who were supported by our government in one form of another.

The real Bill should be, THe American Public Pulling the Plug on Government/Corporatocracy.The governments policies are the biggest form of terrorism these days..and if you don't believe that then you haven't been paying attention.

I wouldn't use that page to get the real history of the internet. That's more like what happened as the www entered the public eye. It's very generic and only includes things that came after. The dates 93-94 only represent the growing public interest and Gore only helped bring the technology further into the public in the mid 90s. The www part actually entered the public eye closer to 91 but there was a lot going on before that. I don't see the names of any of the people that actually brought the elements of the internet into existence. The internet was in development long before the dates on that page and it was certainly in development before the public became aware of it. Email was in use in the early 70s. That page is more like some text you'd see in a technology museum where they don't actually say anything important and leave out all the details that really matter. I think you need to dig a lot deeper if you want to know the full history. There's a lot more to the story.

tsstevens brings up other points that are also as important that people should be talking about.

Doesn't matter. Government is for the people by the people. They work for us. This aint a dictatorship...yet. So even if our military did it, or anyone in the infrastructure of the government, it belongs to the people...and now its global. Its not a private corporation and now that not only do corporations rely on it for commerce, communication and progress so do the smaller companies and the individual businesses.

You're talking about having the right to take away peoples living now. Its part of us, like the underlying of fungi world wide network. We lose the humanity when we say who has the right and who doesn't with this sort of thing.

The internet is no trivial issue. Now, its part of how we live and how we communicate with each other what is wrong and what needs to be done.

Not to mention where do we draw the line. If we live in fear of the internet being used for terrorists acts, then we have to worry about tv, radio, publications and then finally being able to speak in public of issues or live in fear of having your family turn on you for expressing yourself at home.

this is a slippery slope. So getting caught up in who created what seems kinda counter productive and way outside the really issues that come with such decisions.

The internet is a way of life for countless people. If the internet stops, their lives or livelihood stops. For some people, if the internet goes off, they might as well turn the power off too. Water we'll need though.

What if the government says the oxygen surrounding the white house or at countless unknown locations is in danger of being replaced with an odorless poisonous gas that the terrorists now have in their possession and the government wants to pass a bill that says you have to stop breathing if the danger they defined is executed in a method they defined. Is it ok for them to force you to stop breathing?

I know that sounds ridiculous but that is my point. It's ridiculous for the government to tell us they can shut down the internet, and for security? It's all bogus and based on fear and illusions. It doesn't matter who first used or uses the internet (like the military, who are actually just people believe it or not) and it doesn't matter who first created it (other people not in the military). Furthermore, no one created oxygen but the ingredients for it was in existence before it filled up the atmosphere. We know what oxygen is made of on some level but we don't know where the ingredients came from or who made them or why. Oxygen is obviously much different from the internet, unless you're a molecule, but ultimately the same principles will be applied to everything. And anything has the potential to be recreated by someone else who has never heard of the original technology. If we discover another planet of humanoids who just created an "internet" are we going to tell them that we created the internet first so we have the right to tell them when to shut it down? At the same time our technology may be millions of years old to advanced beings who've been around much longer and have already decided we are just a bunch of lunatics. The closer you look at the way we live life in our tiny secluded world, the more ridiculous it all becomes... but all this talk about who is responsible for the internet is getting off topic (which is partly my fault) because it doesn't matter.

Back to what Bite was saying, if the government actually gets to have the power to turn off the internet, it will be because we the people gave them that power. But if the government decides they have the power over the people, that is a whole other story. The more power they get, the more they want. The government seems to keep doing whatever it wants more and more over time and if we keep going in that direction....

We don't know how far off we are from some incredible advances in all technologies that could alter this planet and our lives in ways we've never seen or known. If power hungry mindless freaks are in control we'll be kissing any kind of normal life good bye.

BTW: We should probably move this topic to the Current Events forum in Non-Animation.